In Northern California, purple sea urchins are decimating kelp forests. Though the species of urchin causing problems may vary by region, the damage is the same. NNehring/iStock This article is ...

Each morning, they boat out to kelp forests to study the relationship between sea urchins that eat kelp and sunflower sea stars that eat the urchins.

Billions of sea stars have wasted away in recent years, their crustose, spiny bodies melted to goop by a mysterious illness ...

Key takeawaysKelp forests play an important role in healthy coastal ecosystems, but they prefer cold water and die off if the ...

Key takeaways In underwater experiments off Alaska, red sea urchins kept their distance from kelp placed near caged sunflower sea stars, suggesting that the mere presence of these predators can ...

These 24-armed, roughly 3-feet-wide sea stars can move 40 inches per minute when on the prowl for crabs, snails, sea urchins, and other ocean creatures to eat.

Keeping kelp forests healthy requires a balance of kelp-eating ‘grazers’, like urchins and abalone, and predators – like sea stars – who eat the grazers.

Purple sea urchins, beware: There’s a purple urchin-eating predator on the horizon — and its name is the sunflower sea star.

Sea urchins are devouring California’s coastal kelp faster than it can reproduce, researchers said. Photo by Portuguese Gravity on Unsplash California scientists are declaring war on sea urchins ...

Our findings suggest the diversity of predators eating large sea urchins is broader than we thought — and that could prove to be good news for protecting our kelp forests.

It revealed more competition between the different urchins, kelp, and other species in California, which slowed down the influence sea otters had on the entire system.